A four-year-old article about him in the Houston Chronicle points out that

Although he has no seminary training and his only experience was as a deacon, Shauberger was picked over other candidates to become Oak Island’s pastor because of his stirring oratory, members said.

Shauberger continues to commute to the church from Liberty, where he raised his seven children and ran for public office [as a Republican] a dozen times. He lost each election — including his last one in 2002 for state representative — but never let that discourage him.

Amazing he didn’t get the job; between the mendacity, the fraud, and the propensity to fuck the weak and defenseless, he clearly has all the qualifications to be a successful politician.

Buddhist mobs hurling bricks overran a pair of mosques and set hundreds of homes ablaze in central Myanmar on Tuesday, injuring at least 10 people in the latest anti-Muslim violence to shake the Southeast Asian nation.

Terrified Muslim families who fled the assaults around Okkan, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Yangon, could be seen hiding in forests along roads and crouching in paddy fields afterward. Some, in a state of shock, wept as their houses burned in the night.

Do you ever see an athlete publicly acknowledging the Lord Jesus after a losing game?

Doesn’t happen.*

Have you ever heard devout folk blaming god for an earthquake that killed thousands of people?

No dice — they’re too intent on praising the miracle of one or two victims getting extracted from the rubble alive, a week later. That’s right: Rather than take the thousands of innocents who got crushed and suffocated as compelling evidence that there is no (benevolent) god, they focus on the odd survivor as proof that there is.

But didn’t god create that earthquake in the first place?

It’s long been driving me nuts.

Let’s say you order the chef’s menu in a restaurant and are served an appetizer of dried nasal mucus in goat-turd sauce, a main course of soiled crusty socks cooked in a reduction of maggots, and a dessert that is actually a pretty good ice-cream sundae. On balance, would you call that a satisfying culinary experience?

Christians do it all the time. In fact, they rave about the celestial chef’s miracle sundae, while ignoring the torrents of revolting shit he unleashes on unsuspecting diners. The most they’ll say about the revolting shit is that they probably deserve and must endure it, because chef got mad at a few of the other guests (probably the two guys holding hands in the corner).

And after they’ve gobbled it all up, every last repellent lump, they insist that this chef is the best and only chef in the universe; and they pity others who don’t want the shit buffet; and they pray for them to come round and sample the divine fare.

The Godless Geeks website calls the god-is-good line of reasoning an “Argument from incomplete devastation.”

While I’m at it, another one that exasperates me is the fallacious argument from tradition, which essentially holds that the Christian god exists because people have been believing in him for 2,000 years.

When it comes to Muslims and violence, it’s not often that the New York Times goes beyond the standard narrative that radical Islamists are (a) poor, (b) poorly educated, and (c) understandably upset over a series of real or perceived injustices, from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to the publication of some Motoons.

But Times columnist Thomas Friedman, to his credit, is willing to hold the perpetrators of terrorism to account without making excuses, and with — get this — logic.

[W]hat in God’s name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.

A simple question: If you were upset with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why didn’t you go out and build a school in Afghanistan to strengthen that community or get an advanced degree to strengthen yourself or become a math teacher in the Muslim world to help its people be less vulnerable to foreign powers? Dzhokhar claims the Tsarnaev brothers were so upset by something America did in a third country that they just had to go to Boylston Street and blow up people who had nothing to do with it (some of whom could have been Muslims), and too often we just nod our heads rather than asking: What kind of sick madness is this?

Of course, rationality has never been religion’s strong suit, and Islam is quite possibly the faith that’s most impervious to logic. Friedman’s question may have to be repeated a few million times before it begins to sink in. Check back in a few generations.

A former Texas youth minister, 29, is accused of molesting a teenage girl; and his brother, 24, who was once a volunteer at the same church, is facing similar charges — for getting jiggy and exchanging sex pictures with two other underage victims.

All three alleged victims were 16-year-old girls whom the brothers met through Arapaho Road Baptist Church in Garland, TX. In one case, a girl told police she performed oral sex on one of the brothers in a church Sunday school room. Another of the incidents is alleged to have occurred during an off-site Bible study session with the other brother.

I wonder what part of the Bible they studied. Maybe it was Genesis 19:8, in which the holy Lot offers his virgin daughters to a crowd of lecherous rapists.

Joshua Earls, 29 [photo, right], who worked his way up from intern to youth minister at Arapaho Road Baptist, was arrested more than two weeks ago on a Garland charge of indecency with a child.

Jordan Earls, 24, a student pastor at his father’s church in South Carolina and former volunteer at the Garland church, was arrested in South Carolina and transferred to the Collin County Jail. He is charged with online solicitation of a minor in Collin County and indecency with a child and two counts of sexual assault of a child in Garland.

Investigators say there could be additional charges.

The Earls’ father, Bobby Earls, did not return phone calls seeking comment. He is the pastor at Northgate Baptist Church in Florence, S.C., where Jordan Earls was recently student minister. All references to Bobby Earls’ children have been eliminated from the Northgate Baptist website.

Of course, church members are shocked, shocked; the brothers are Christians.

“Both of them, as far as I know, wouldn’t do anything like that,” said one church employee. “They’re both solid Christian guys. It’s out of character.”

A church rector with an annual compensation package of 1.3 million dollars?

Welcome to Trinity Church in Manhattan, whose assets, the New York Times revealed today, are valued at more than $2 billion.

The Episcopal parish, known as Trinity Wall Street, traces its holdings to a gift of 215 acres of prime Manhattan farmland donated in 1705 by Queen Anne of England. Since then, the church has parlayed that gift into a rich portfolio of office buildings, stock investments and, soon, mixed-use residential development.

The church funnels enormous chunks of that fortune into shelters and soup kitchens.

Just kidding. In 2011, Trinity Church earmarked all of three million dollars for “philanthropic grant spending” — less than 0.15% of its total worth.

It reported $158 million in real estate revenue for 2011, the majority of which went toward maintaining and supporting its real estate operations, the financial statement indicates. Of the $38 million left for the church’s operating budget, some $4 million was spent on communications, $3 million on philanthropic grant spending and $2.5 million on the church’s music program.

Then there are the earthly rewards enjoyed by the Rev. James H. Cooper, who has been the church’s rector since 2004. He gets a salary of almost $40,000 a month,

…which rises to a total compensation of $1.3 million [annually] when his pension and the estimated cost of his residence in a $5.5 million, church-owned SoHo town house are added.

The Times article details that the church board — the “vestry members” — fight with the Reverend Cooper all the time

…over whether the church should be spending more money to help the poor and spread the faith, in New York and around the world. Differences over the parish’s mission and direction last year led nearly half the 22-member vestry — an august collection of corporate executives and philanthropists — to resign or be pushed out, after at least seven of them asked, unsuccessfully, that the rector himself step down.

One longtime vestry member who resigned last year alleges that Cooper was part and parcel of “a glaring atmosphere of deceit.”

Sounds like a den of vipers challenging work environment. One can only hope that Cooper’s compensation package makes up for the hardship.

Bonfires lit throughout Israel in honor of Lag b’Omer burned out of control. … Hot, dry and windy conditions in Israel contributed to several heat-wave-related fires …

A large fire broke out at moshav Kfar Uria near Beit Shemesh, causing the evacuation of 200 people from their homes and damaging about 500 acres of forest. Several serious fires also burned out of control in the Jerusalem area after Lag b’Omer bonfires were not properly extinguished.

Fires also burned out of control in Netanya and Rosh Haayin in central Israel.

Observant Jews have long had an uneasy relation with religious flames. In 2005, in Brooklyn,

A fire official said that the Orthodox Jewish custom of leaving a flame burning during Sabbath and holidays has caused 35 kitchen fires at Bedford Gardens, the 600-unit apartment complex in Williamsburg, in the last several months.

The faithful, you see, would just leave their stoves on for religious reasons, sometimes burning themselves and their neighbors out of their homes.

Injuries and deaths occurred frequently as a result of Passover conflagrations. In 2004, also in New York, five people, including two young children, sustained horrible burns when a rabbi’s son and Darwin Award candidate tried to keep a pre-Passover flame going by pouring paint thinner on it.

The situation has since improved, thanks to city officials and NYFD staff waging a yearly campaign to remind devout Jews that flames are hot and fire burns.

Five Indonesian teenage girls have been accused of blasphemy and may face jail after making a video in which they mixed Islamic prayer with dancing to a Maroon 5 song. The girls were expelled from their high school in Tolitoli city, on Sulawesi island, and reported to police after the video of their dance to the US band’s hit “One More Night” went viral online.

The school brought the video, which was posted online in March, to the attention of police who questioned the girls on suspicion of blasphemy. “The school and members of the community were offended by the video and felt it insulted Islam,” Tolitoli police chief Rudi Mulyanto told AFP. “We are considering the case, and if we think it is serious, we will recommend they be officially charged in court.”

Blasphemy in Indonesia carries a maximum sentence of five years, though minors usually face half the adult sentence and are locked up in juvenile detention facilities. The girls are in grade 12, where students are normally aged 17 or 18. Police did not give their ages but said they were being treated as minors. The school principal told a local news website that the school had consulted the country’s top clerical body, the Indonesian Ulema Council, as well as the FPI on the matter.

The FPI notification makes this case especially worrisome. FPI stands for Front Pembela Islam, the Islamic Defenders Front. The paramilitary group is known for “rampant violence” in the ostensible defense of Islam. Its targets have included Playboy Indonesia, shops that sell alcohol, restaurants that remain open during Ramadan’s daylight hours, and Christian churches.

FPI’s demonstrations of faith range from incitement to property destruction to manslaughter.

James ‘the Giant’ Croft stands 3’10” tall. He’s a Southern Baptist evangelist preacher, and also a freshly-minted Baker County Commissioner in Florida.

It’s when Croft can’t keep those jobs separate that he appears to invite major trouble. The Florida Times-Union headlines its article about the reverend “James ‘The Giant’ Croft preaches from two pulpits,“andright there the scope of this little preacher’s big arrogance becomes apparent.

While he saves most of his preaching for the pulpit, Croft believes in applying Christian principles to government and occasionally quotes scripture during meetings.

“We need to be placed where we have influence on folks in a positive way,” Croft said. “If we don’t, everywhere we leave a vacancy, Satan will fill it.”

If Mr. Croft really wants to serve the people of Baker County, he’d do well to keep his beliefs out of the local government’s business. I’d sure hate to see his constituents — believers and nonbelievers alike — have to foot the legal bill when the ACLU or the Freedom From Religion Foundation remind the commissioners of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

GlobalPost senior correspondent in South Africa, Erin Conway-Smith, says that in the last few years in South Africa, there have been several murders of young people where “satanism” was said to be involved.

For example, there is a trial continuing in the murder of 18-year-old Kirsty Theologo who was doused with gas and set on fire in what was described as a satanic ritual.

Another example is the killing of a 6-year-old girl last month in KwaZulu-Natal province; charged in her murder is Wiseman Tholelani Shandu who is said to be part of a satanist group.

NOTE: Moral Compass is a compendium of religious wickedness. All alleged violators mentioned in our posts are innocent until proven guilty in court.

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PAINE AND JEFFERSON ON RELIGION:

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." — Thomas Paine

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." — Thomas Jefferson